Air Canada was web-impaired in busted-wheelchair affair

By Bill Mann

The New York stories of a terminally ill 10-year-old B.C. boy whose wheelchair was smashed up on a fundraising trip there and that of a terminally disgusted Jet Blue flight attendant at JFK may not seem to have much in common, but they do: They both highlight the increasing importance of social media like Twitter and Facebook for airlines’ customer relations and for issuing quick responses. In this department, Air Canada has miles to go.

A Toronto Globe and Mail piece by tech writer Amber MacArthur this week noted that Canada’s national airline came across as the proverbial “bad guy” when young Tanner Baun, who has muscular dystrophy, visited New York City recently to live out one of his last wishes. When he learned that his wheelchair had been badly damaged in transit, the story went viral on Twitter. And even though Air Canada was working on the problem and fixing the wheelchair, it took the airline a mind-boggling 24 hours to let the public know it was making repairs to the badly damaged $15,000 chair.

Tanner’s social-network followers were on the case immediately — unlike the airline.

“I’m distressed that it took the internet shrieking loudly at them for it to happen,” Tanner’s aunt, blogger Catherine Connors, told the Globe and Mail.

She added: “If my sister and Tanner had been here on their own with no blogging or without the vast social-media network to help them, it wouldn’t have turned out this way.”

Other airlines’ Twitter sites, like Southwest’s busy one – it passed 1,000,000 followers this week – receive and immediately respond to customers’ gripes and queries.

And the celebrated case of Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater, who had 65,000 Facebook fans within a day of his grand exit down a passenger slide with two beers after berating an abusive passenger, was another example of the growing importance of social media to airlines, who face one P.R. and customer-complaint problem after another.

Air Canada is a fine airline — my son just flew Air Canada from Portland, OR, to Paris and back with his family and with zero complaints. But it needs to get its internet act together, and fast.

As tech contributor Amber MacArthur wrote in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail:

“If a situation explodes, such as this Air Canada web fiasco, it’s important for a business to respond to the flurry of comments and criticisms. If there are too many people flooding your feed with messages, then Twitter, Facebook, and other online tools make it easy to simply post an update saying that you’re aware of the situation and you’re working on a solution.

“Although Air Canada was apparently in the loop quickly as what was happening with the wheelchair, from the web perspective, they were a black hole.”